Dennis Quaid Sees These Similarities to Era Before Reagan Today
By Movieguide® Contributor
Dennis Quaid revealed why he believes his upcoming Ronald Reagan biopic is pertinent to today and what he hopes audiences will gain from watching the movie.
“There’s a lot of interest in [the movie], and the times are very much like they were back in the late ’70s before Reagan came to office in 1980, you know. Iran had hostages, and there was the Soviet Union, and 90% [of Americans] thought there was going to be a nuclear war, interest rates — I remember, to buy a house, interest rates were 20%…there was this feeling of malaise in the country, like we were a declining nation that had a weak president,” Quaid told CBN.
“Reagan came along, and the day he took office, not two hours after he took the oath of office, Iran released the hostages because they didn’t want to deal with Reagan,” Quaid added. “They looked at his strength which made them fear him…he definitely won the Cold War. He was called a warmonger that he was going to get us into a nuclear conflict with the Soviets. He was called a cowboy, you know, he fixed the economy, it took a couple of years. He survived an assassination. The country came together and was united.”
While drawing attention to the similarities to today, Quaid also wants audiences to see a new side to Reagan that even those who lived through his presidency would not know. Rather than simply impersonating Reagan’s persona, Quaid wanted to reach the core of his being.
“I didn’t want it to be a history lesson. I wanted to find the human Reagan and who he was as a person. I went to the Reagan Ranch… and I come out through the fence and see the place, and I realized Reagan was a very humble man. You can feel it, he really did do all the work that was there,” Quaid said.
“The house that was the ‘Western White House’ was barely 1,100 square feet, you know, barely a two-bedroom house and they had a king size bed but it was two single beds that were zip tied together…You could really feel him there,” he continued.
REAGAN is set to hit theaters on August 30.
“The cast also includes Penelope Ann Miller as First Lady Nancy Reagan, Mena Suvari as his first wife Jane Wyman, Lesley-Anne Down as Margaret Thatcher, Kevin Dillon as Jack L. Warner and Jon Voight as Petrovich, a Soviet who claims to have spied on Reagan for years,” Deadline reported.
Movieguide® previously reported:
Dennis Quaid is proud to portray Ronald Reagan, one of America’s greatest presidents, in the upcoming biopic REAGAN.
“He became president at the exact right moment in history,” Quaid said of our nation’s 40th president while on Mike Rowe’s podcast. “In this country, we’d been through Watergate, went through all that. Jimmy Carter came along, who I voted for by the way. He was honest. There was this kind of like this becoming a man thing.”
“It was also the times with oil and gas, and there was a malaise that took over this country,” Quaid added. “He [Reagan] even said so on television, about the malaise that had taken over and we were a country in decline. That started from the Vietnam era and Reagan came along and it was the perfect time. He told us, ‘There’s a light and America is a beacon on a hill.’”
However, Quaid was initially unsure about accepting the role.
